'The Bear' by Karel Appel is a lithograph presenting a flattened, frontal figure assembled from bold, flat planes of crimson, yellow, blue, and green, outlined in thick black and grey brushwork. The face — two green-ringed eyes and a horizontal slash for a mouth — is set into the red mass with deliberate crudeness, recalling the directness of children's imagery that Appel openly embraced as a guiding principle. A founding member of the CoBrA movement (1948–51), Appel built his practice around rejecting post-war European academicism in favour of raw, instinctive mark-making. The printed lines here retain the gestural energy of brushwork, a quality Appel pursued consistently across painting and printmaking alike.